Gewargis continued his work on the dialogue system. He incorporated “barks”, which are a little dialogue pop ups for the NPCs. These are used throughout the game when the NPCs are idle, giving you a hint, showing distress or any other types of emotions during cutscenes/gameplay. These can be customized per NPC, so each NPC can have a different style to them.

Mason has been getting himself acquainted with the new enemy behavior system. This coming week he’ll go through the process of rebuilding each of the enemies with the new behavior system. Unfortunately it won’t bear any awesome looking fruit but it will bear some added efficiency fruit (the most delicious fruit of them all). Once we have all of the current enemies repurposed to used the event system we will have many of the components for future enemies making our baddy creation process much more modular.

Larry has finished the reorg and merged it back to master. All of our assets and prefabs that we’re using are tagged/organized and the stuff we’re no longer/not going to use has been removed.

Development is now very close to allowing a test build. We’re pretty confident by next weekend we’ll actually be pushing an update to the downloadable test build! (If you haven’t noticed, we’ve shied away from mentioned specific dates for quite a while now; so us talking about it now means it’s really happening, folks.)

This week we were able to get back on pace after the slowdown last week.

The reorg of the project folder is mostly complete, with just the merge remaining. We’ve all upgraded to the newly released Unity 2017 as well, with no adverse effects.

The new enemy behavioral system is ready to be implemented and we’re under way refitting all of the old enemies to work with the new system. This new behavior system changes how the data and actions are structured but not how they work. The new structure is going to allow us to save a lot of time by making each component of enemy behavior into a separate and reusable piece so that we’ll be able to construct new enemies without needing to rebuild older enemy actions, reactions, and detectors. We may go into more detail on how exactly the new behavior system works but it’s going to streamline things in a major way and I can’t wait till it’s fully implemented.

Next week we’ll pull all new work since the fork off our main branch, into the new branch, and then we’ll be back on task of releasing the test build.

This is just a quick update. We didn’t move as many pieces this week as we wanted, due to one vacation, and another sick dev. However despite that, Mason and Peter were able to work through a bug with the eTool. Anyways, more progress to come this week, and as always…

The intern has had a number of improvements in the last few months and a lot of it has had to do with how he moves mid air. One big thing we were missing, partly because it’s not built in, was mid air drag. You may have seen a blog post about its addition in the past. Lately, though, we’ve been thinking that we can do more to make mid air movement even tighter. What we’re looking at now is mid air acceleration. The change is subtle and we want to continue to refine it but it’s clear that the Intern’s base acceleration needs to be malleable if we want to get the best feeling character that we can make. The Intern is an ongoing project and we will continue to refine how the player controls our scrappy hero!

Other than that, the dialogue has been coming together nicely. We’re at the point where we can start to incorporate missions into the dialogue system. Behavioral systems continue to ramp up to working and implemented status. We’re still working off a fork of the master branch, knee deep in a reorg of assets, folders, and labels.

We can’t wait for just a few more pieces to fall into place and we’ll have our first in a regular series of fun-to-play™ test builds in your hands.

Larry branched off of our repo and is moving files and adding asset labels to everything we’re currently using or will use, and removing excess and unused assets from the old directories. The folder structure has now been finalized as well. After all the art, animations, prefabs, etc are all moved and labeled it’ll have been a major step towards allowing us to release regular test builds. No longer will all the parts and components which compose the game be organized like spaghetti.

Gewargis worked through an issue which suddenly appears where some GUI elements were displaying at half size, even though the scaling values were unchanged. Once this issue is resolved he’s getting back on dialog and pop up boxes.

Mason has been working more on the Brain Bot enemy, specifically issues where movement patterns are inadvertently allowing movement into walls. That issue is fixed now and the Brain Bot is ready to battle. Between the Brain Bot and the Bat Bot we now have a solid groundwork for keeping enemies in bounds of their rooms.

Our todo lists are getting smaller, and the test build is that much closer to coming. Without a doubt we are back on pace to get at least 2 or 3 test builds out this summer, hopefully more.